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mental health
Progressive Activist Avi Lewis Launches Bid for NDP Leadership in Canada
Lewis said NDP must “fling the doors wide open, and build a party for the 99%.”
Sep 25, 2025
The longtime progressive activist Avi Lewis officially launched his bid for leadership of Canada's New Democratic Party, which he aims to revitalize with a platform of economic populism.
Lewis, a journalist and documentarian whose grandfather helped to found the NDP in 1961, says the way to bring the party back to relevance amid an electoral low point is to “fling the doors wide open, and build a party for the 99%.”
At a kickoff party in Toronto on Wednesday, the former parliamentary candidate from Vancouver railed against the “Liberal-Conservative alliance” that dominates Canadian politics. The two major parties' leaders, Lewis said, "compete fiercely in public, while behind the scenes, they collude to boost corporate profits."
"In the name of protecting the country, the government is rapidly passing and proposing legislation that will change the culture and character of Canada," Lewis said. "From sweeping aside Indigenous rights and environmental protections for so-called nation-building projects, to rolling back higher taxes on the uberwealthy and digital giants, to the generational austerity of 15% cuts to public spending, to the $9 billion that materialized in an instant for the military this year, ramping up to $150 billion a year a decade from now—the changes afoot are extreme."
Lewis pledged to “build a government that is an instrument for the people, not for corporate Canada.”
The NDP—once Canada's third-largest national political party—has been ailing of late after a dismal showing in the nation's most recent parliamentary elections. The party, which held over 100 seats 14 years ago, dropped to a new low of just seven seats in 2025, not enough to even be recognized for committee assignments or federal funding.
The humiliating showing resulted in the resignation of Jagmeet Singh, who'd led the party for eight years, but was widely criticized by those on the left for his coziness with the establishment of the dominant Liberal Party and his failure to keep the NDP competitive. It is in this state of "political wilderness" that Lewis has emerged with an ambitious change agenda.
(Video: Avi Lewis for NDP Leader)
"Life in Canada today feels on the edge," Lewis said in a video released last week announcing his leadership run. "Everyone seeking a little stability, everyone being told 'You're all on your own.'"
He identified several causes of that precarity. One was the "economic attack" from US President Donald Trump, whom Lewis described as sending "disruption grenades" in the form of steep tariffs and annexation threats. But Lewis said that Trump merely "magnifies... the everyday emergency of trying to get by in an impossible economy."
According to one survey conducted in July, 57% of Canadians said their current incomes did not allow them to afford basic necessities like housing, groceries, energy, and cell phone plans.
"Working hard doesn't earn you a living," Lewis said.
"These days, every politician claims to be shocked by the costs," he continued. "What they don't talk about is why: The billions in profits for the tiny group of corporations that control every part of our economy. Three phone providers, three grocery giants, five oil companies, and the five big banks that fund them."
Lewis' plan to confront corporate power is years in the making. Alongside his wife, the acclaimed journalist and author Naomi Klein, Lewis rolled out the Leap Manifesto in 2015 as an agenda for the NDP. Leap focused on confronting the climate crisis, but its contents formed the basis of what he now refers to as a "Green New Deal." The accelerating climate emergency remains at the center of his agenda in 2025.
"Oil and gas CEOs," he said in the video, are "not just hoarding extreme wealth," but "foreclosing on our shared future."
Lewis has never held a parliamentary office, though he has run for a federal Vancouver-area seat twice before and achieved two third-place finishes, receiving 26% of the vote in 2021 and 12.5% in 2025.
In his bid to lead NDP, he has so far leaned heavily into his family legacy and his reputation as a lifelong activist who has "butted heads with the powerful," over issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the privatization of healthcare and public transit.
"For four decades," he said, "I have stood with workers, telling stories of working-class heroes and organizing for dignity in factories and fields, classrooms and care homes, shop floors and fishing fleets."
Lewis, who also identified free trade deals as job killers, proposed a "Green New Deal" as a means to revive Canadian industry and create "millions of good-paying jobs."
He has also proposed a wealth tax, a national cap on rent increases, a public option for groceries, and expanded universal healthcare that covers "medication to mental health."
During his speech Wednesday night, Lewis described NDP as "the only party that can accurately diagnose the cause of our everyday emergency, and offer solutions as big as the crises we face."
"The federal government has the power, the resources, and the responsibility to ensure the fundamentals of a good life—healthy food, truly affordable housing, functioning public transit, and hey, maybe a proper vacation once in a while," he said. "But we won’t get it if we don’t fight for it. And that’s where the NDP comes in. After all, the NDP is the original party of workers’ struggle. And in this moment of epic change and uncertainty, the party is needed as never before."
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'Just Kill Em': Fox News Host Endorses Giving Homeless People 'Involuntary Lethal Injection'
"Universal healthcare, housing, and anti-poverty programs are considered more 'radical' on Fox News than mass murder," said one healthcare advocate.
Sep 14, 2025
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade is facing calls to resign after suggesting earlier this week that the state should execute homeless people who decline help during a live broadcast.
Kilmeade made the comments during a Wednesday episode of Fox & Friends, during which the panel discussed the recent shocking video of the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska aboard a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a mentally ill homeless man, which has ignited a flurry of often racist vitriol on the right toward Black Americans and homeless people.
Another of the hosts, Lawrence Jones, claimed that the government has "given billions of dollars to mental health, to the homeless population," but that "a lot of them don't want to take the programs, a lot of them don't want to get the help that is necessary."
Jones continued: "You can't give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going to give you, or you decide that you're going to be locked up in jail. That's the way it has to be now."
Kilmeade then interjected with his suggestion that instead of jail, they should be given "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em."
As one X user noted, Jones and co-host Ainsley Earhardt, "[didn't] even blink an eye" in response to this call for mass murder.
While the claim that homeless people often "refuse" abundant services is a common talking point, it is not borne out by data. According to a report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness in 2023, more than three-fourths of direct service providers reported that they were forced to turn away homeless people due to staffing shortages.
But even in cases where homeless people are offered services—such as temporary shelter beds—and decline them, they often do so not because they prefer to be on the street but because shelters are often overcrowded and poorly maintained, or have restrictive rules that require them to separate from their families, pets, and belongings.
When homeless people are offered permanent shelter, they are comparatively much more likely to accept it. According to one 2020 study from UC San Francisco, 86% of "high-risk" chronically homeless people given access to permanent supportive housing were successfully housed and remained in their housing for several years, a much higher rate than those given temporary solutions.
But as Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on X, "Universal healthcare, housing, and anti-poverty programs are considered more 'radical' on Fox News than mass murder."
Kilmeade's calls to execute the homeless were met with horror and disgust from advocates. Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, called for Kilmeade to resign.
“It is dangerous. It shows a lack of human compassion and it is really the worst possible time for that kind of language to be expressed,” Whitehead told the Irish Star.
Jesse Rabinowitz, communications and campaign manager with the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington, DC, noted in The Independent that Kilmeade's comments come as the Trump administration "is proposing government-run detention camps and massive psychiatric asylums" to house the homeless.
In August, the president launched a crackdown against homeless encampments in DC that advocates say has left hundreds of people with nowhere to go and dependent on overwhelmed city services. Meanwhile, his administration and recent Republican legislation have introduced massive cuts to housing funding for homeless people across the United States.
“America’s homeless population includes over a million children and tens of thousands of veterans, many of whom served in Iraq or Afghanistan,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). “Nobody deserves to be murdered by the government for mental illness or poverty. These Fox hosts are calling for mass murder—it’s sick.”
Kilmeade apologized for his comment on Sunday, describing it as an "extremely callous remark.” There is no indication from Fox News that Kilmeade will be subject to any disciplinary action over his remarks, which critics found noteworthy given the punishments other figures in mainstream media have faced for saying far less.
Photojournalist Zach D. Roberts pointed out that earlier this week, MSNBC fired contributor Matthew Dowd for criticizing the "hateful" and "divisive" rhetoric of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk shortly after he'd been assassinated.
"On MSNBC, a contributor got fired for lightly criticizing Charlie Kirk," Roberts said. "Meanwhile, on Fox News, Brian Kilmeade calls for the murder of homeless people for being homeless. Nothing has happened to him. I don't know if there can be a more obvious divide in politics."
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Want to Resist Trump? Treat the Homeless With Compassion
If you don’t want to acquiesce to the president’s way of doing things, might it not finally be time to make eye contact with those neighbors of ours who are homeless?
Sep 14, 2025
The federal takeover of Washington, DC rightfully attracted extensive media coverage, but an executive order called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” quietly issued on July 24, received remarkably little attention. Perhaps it didn’t make a splash because it wasn’t specifically about policing (or, for that matter, National Guarding), but more generally about how we should treat people who already exist on the outermost fringes of society, human beings who have long been reduced to labels like “addict” or “homeless.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is counting on us to renounce those living on the streets, while struggling with their mental health or the cost of housing (or both). And if history is any guide, that may be exactly what most of us do. While the current moment may feel shocking in so many ways, the president’s order to end what he’s labeled “disorder” represents a further development of norms that have been in place for all too long. They are also norms that we have the power to change.
Identifying a very real crisis, the president’s July 24 executive order noted that “the number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration—274,224—was the highest ever recorded.” The order went on to state that the majority of those who are unhoused have a substance use disorder, with two-thirds reporting that they have used hard drugs at some point in their lives. What followed was the administration’s solution: “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings… will restore public order.” Precisely which institutions was unclear.
One thing we know is that the use of substances is often connected to past trauma or current hardship, including oppression and poverty. Regardless of that reality, not just the president but all too many of us tend to believe that people who use drugs are undeserving of our compassion or support. In 2021, a national survey found that 7 of every 10 Americans believed that those who use drugs problematically are “outcasts” or “non-community members.” (And yes, those were the terms used.)
The president’s executive order fuses drug use and homelessness into a single issue without revealing that homelessness can cause or exacerbate substance use disorder—because people use drugs to cope with privation. As addiction expert Gabor Maté has said, “Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.” Much like those of us who reach for wine or social media in order to escape, when people who are unhoused use drugs, they are usually searching for a way to make life tolerable. At the same time, they come to be regarded by their peers as non-community members, making it so much less likely that this nation will fight the president on his plans to round them up and erase them from our world entirely.
Meanwhile, many of us with homes never pause to consider our common habit of avoiding unhoused people in every possible way. We cross the street, shift our gaze, anything to avoid the briefest glimpse of their humanity—perhaps terrified to see ourselves in them. Here’s a thought, though: If you don’t want to acquiesce to the president’s way of doing things, might it not finally be time to make eye contact with those neighbors of ours who are homeless? Might it not be time to acknowledge their humanity and, in doing so, recover some of our own?
“Arbitrary and Prolonged Detention”
The Los Angeles nonprofit LA Más helps residents build security through collective economic power and home ownership. As Helen Leung, its executive director, put it recently: “Families who’ve been in their neighborhoods for generations are getting priced out. Vendors who work multiple jobs are sleeping in their cars. Kids have classroom friends disappear mid-semester because rent went up again.” She noted that immigrants and working-class households in particular are experiencing acute displacement pressure, which ultimately pushes some to become houseless—and now they find themselves in the crosshairs of the president’s July executive order.
That order proposes the vast expansion of a practice that has been around for a very long time. In recent years, in fact, in states across this country, there has been an uptick in involuntary commitment, a trade term for the forced institutionalization of people who are unwell—or, now, simply unhoused.
Evidence suggests that rounding up masses of unwell people and institutionalizing them will do anything but benefit public safety, while endangering the individuals who are locked up.
Elected officials of all political stripes, including the current president, have claimed that involuntary commitment is an evidence-based way to treat mental illnesses, including addiction. Research does show that, in certain cases, involuntary commitment can be beneficial. But in all too many cases, it’s both ineffective and inhumane. A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the institutionalization of individuals who were involuntarily hospitalized in “judgment call cases”—meaning cases where one physician might recommend hospitalization, while another would not—nearly doubled the risk of death by suicide or overdose. It also nearly doubled the likelihood of that person later being charged with a violent crime, perhaps because such institutionalization disrupted employment, subjecting people to still more dire economic circumstances. (Again, don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.) Even a recent essay in the New York Times advocating forced treatment conceded that it must be well funded and thoughtfully carried out—conditions that are virtually certain to be unmet in the current climate.
In other words, evidence suggests that rounding up masses of unwell people and institutionalizing them will do anything but benefit public safety, while endangering the individuals who are locked up. On-the-ground data also indicates that, even before US President Donald Trump focused on that tactic, such commitment was unequally applied, with Black and Hispanic people more likely than White people to be institutionalized against their will.
“We’re not operating with an optimal treatment system, mandatory or voluntary,” according to Regina LaBelle, director of the Center on Addiction Policy at Georgetown University and the former acting director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “We’re starting from a really bad system. And so pushing people into a really bad system will end really badly.”
In response to the president’s executive order, the American Bar Association published a statement saying that it raises grave constitutional and civil rights issues and “paves the way for arbitrary and prolonged detention.”
Housing Is a Human Right
A response to the president’s executive order, published in the Psychiatric Times, a journal for psychiatry professionals, noted that it “invokes fear of people with psychiatric illnesses, talks of indiscriminate incarceration of people who have not committed a crime, as well as collection and sharing of sensitive health information with law enforcement, and yet proposes no actual solutions.”
Unfortunately, the president and his crew undoubtedly do regard the involuntary commitment of unhoused people as an “actual solution.” Indeed, many people who have homes or apartments feel unhappy at the sight of human beings living on the streets of their neighborhood and want something done about it. But the underlying problem isn’t that people live on the street or use substances in public in order to tolerate despair. As Helen Leung put it, “When someone loses their housing, it’s not because they need to be institutionalized—it’s because we’ve allowed housing to become a commodity instead of a human right.”
“What works best is making sure that we have affordable housing for people,” says LaBelle. New research out of Philadelphia, for instance, found that a program of cash assistance for housing costs more than halved the odds of participants becoming homeless.
But our prevailing housing system—in which the purpose is less to provide shelter than to generate profits for those who own real estate—has resulted in rents or costs that are beyond reach for increasing numbers of Americans. And as if such a state of affairs weren’t bad enough, President Trump now plans to make “alternative” investment assets, including real estate, available to anyone with a 401(k). If he succeeds in doing so, far more people will compete to own real estate for the purposes of turning a profit, which will undoubtedly raise real estate prices yet more, driving rents higher still.
Notably, his July 24 executive order provides law enforcement with the vague instruction to institutionalize people who “cannot care for themselves,” which could result in a kind of real estate roulette. In essence, those who lack the cash to pay for housing at market rates—no matter how high those rates rise—could be deemed unable to care for themselves, and therefore would become eligible to be rounded up and taken… where?
Very Much Precedented
On one matter there is widespread agreement: There’s already a distinct shortage of mental health services, especially for those who can’t pay for them.
“Our current system does not provide for long-term institutionalization,” noted the Psychiatric Times in its response to the president’s executive order, which itself does nothing to expand the inpatient capacity of treatment facilities or increase funding for mental health services. The administration actually slashed funding for such programs this spring and has approved cuts to Medicaid, a program that currently funds 24% of all mental-health and substance-use care in the United States.
It’s easy to blame Trump, but far harder to engage in self-reflection: How have I participated in the dehumanization of unhoused people or those who use drugs?
So where will people be taken? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed rural camps for addiction recovery, but that (controversial) policy would require substantial new funding, rather than cuts, to healthcare. The president and Congress do seem to have an appetite for increasing funding for military and enforcement programs. The hastily constructed immigration detention facility in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz” offers a nightmarish example of how this administration pursues the development of new carceral space.
Already, immigrants are being rounded up and institutionalized, a practice likely to be expanded to still more of our neighbors. While all of this may feel unprecedented, it’s all too precedented. This nation has a long history of institutionalizing people who have not committed a crime, including Indigenous people and those with mental health struggles. It’s easy to blame Trump for all that’s now happening, and he certainly bears enormous responsibility, but he’s not responsible for everything.
He is not, for example, responsible for the longstanding and pervasive stigma attached to people who are unhoused or mentally unwell or both, which has pushed all too many of us in the wealthiest nation on Earth to live in isolation and poverty and even to perish. It’s easy to blame Trump, but far harder to engage in self-reflection: How have I participated in the dehumanization of unhoused people or those who use drugs? Do I have the capacity to recognize the humanity in everyone without exception?
ICE (Like Stigma) Now Operates in the Shadows
Perhaps it seems that acknowledging the humanity of those who have so long been dehumanized is far too little and too subtle to make a difference now. And it’s true that we need much more than that, including strong collective action to create housing that people can afford and that’s accessible to those who have experienced addiction and criminalization. But it’s also true that nonjudgmental support from peers makes a difference in the lives of those who are struggling, raising the odds that they may heal and go on to live fruitful and connected lives.
In the past half-year of Donald Trump’s second term as president, raids by masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have become a fixture of American life. ICE now operates in the shadows—and that’s how stigma works, too. Stigma toward people who use drugs or who live without homes is a corrosive force that makes it acceptable to withhold compassion, care, and connection from certain of our neighbors. But unlike forces equipped with military-grade tactical gear, stigma can be overcome by any individual who chooses to witness and affirm the humanity of all our neighbors. And in our present American world, doing so is surely a revolutionary act.
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